How Will I Fill In This Area

First up, Brian Smith sent along this nice photo this week of a well weathered covered hopper. PLCX 27171 looks to me like it was built by Evans Railcar Mfg.  Fairly easily distinguished by the two wider panels, very nice models of this type of car were made in HO scale by ExactRail.

A quick check of the ExactRail website showed only the colourful Erie Western paint scheme of this car available now.  However, over on ebay there were a few of them available in much plainer paint schemes that would make for a very good starting point to emulate the weathering in Brian's picture.

Along my GTW line, I've been trying to figure out what to do with these two industrial buildings, or more accurately, what to do with the space that they are occupying.

Both are kitbashes of the Roberts Printing kit made by Walthers. These have been set in here as temporary placeholders, filling in this location until I can come up with something better. I very seldom even spot cars here.

As an exercise, I lifted the two buildings out just to see if it would spark an ideas for what to do with the space.  Seeing it as a big open space seemed to help a bit too.

I guess now I'll have to look through Walthers and Pikestuff's catalogues to see what I can find.  More on this if/when something develops.

JSSX 815

The Woodstock Train Show would have been tomorrow, April 19th.  It's been cancelled of course, and I'm fine with that, as I'm sure you would be too.  It's the least of our problems right now.  I hope everyone uses their head and continues to act appropriately through this societal nightmare.

I'm quite sure that I've posted this photo before, but here it is again anyway. This is me at my Vendor's Table at Woodstock in October 2018.  George Dutka took the photo.  Thanks George.  Better times ahead everybody.

I gathered together a few shots of 815 as it makes it's way back to the JSSX yard with a short train from the South Industrial Boulevard switching job. 

815 starting out on the run back to the yard.  This engine is the backbone of the JSSX fleet. I numbered it after my sister's birthday.

Crossing the diamond behind the old GTW tower.  The drawbridge is a cutout of  a photo I took of the GTW bridge over Black River in Port Huron, Mi.

Crossing the roadway alongside the scrap yard.  I haven't come up with a name for this road yet.  I'm open to suggestions for that.  Crossbucks and a stop sign are in order here as well. 

Same location as the previous photo, but from the other side.

And back home, beside the JSSX locomotive maintenance building.  815 is scheduled to come out-of-service for a short while for maintenance.  Management will likely temporarily replace it with a short term leaser.

Wordless Wednesday #10

High Cube CN Boxcar

Back on the 15th of January, as one of his Wordless Wednesday posts, George Dutka posted a photo of a CN/DWC 60 foot high-cube Gunderson boxcar over at his excellent White River Division blog. I commented on the reporting marks patching at the time, and following that, George was generous enough to send me an email with a better resolution photo of the car.

Have a look at George's photo...

As I looked around the internet for other reference photos of similar boxcars, I happened across this one that was taken by my friend Luc Sabourin. 

I have an Athearn Genesis model of a boxcar that's in the same 793 number series and is supposed to be a reasonably close approximation of this type of boxcar.  I suppose Athearn's thought was that it's close enough to the prototype and guys (like me) will buy it.  Hey, I didn't even notice the quite obvious differences until Luc told me. The easy to see difference between model and prototype is that the Athearn model has too many exterior posts and panels on the sides, and the ends aren't quite right either.

Regardless, it's a nice looking model, and I decided that I would patch the reporting marks and paint over the lower portion of the car in roughly the same pattern as George's photo.  I'm not going to try to replicate the graffiti though.  Maybe sometime in the future, but right now I don't feel that I'm talented enough to do the graffiti justice in HO scale.

So here goes with my patching effort:  First up is the plain model, to which I had previously sprayed a light overspray of grime to flatten down the shine.

All taped up and ready to patch:

I sprayed ModelFlex Light Tuscan Oxide through the airbrush. The paint seems to go on heavy, so I'm doing my best to better train myself to spray multiple lighter coats.  Here it is after painting and the masking removed:

And now the boxcar finished up and in service on the JSSX:

The small patches on the doors would be quite difficult to use masking tape, so I sprayed some decal paper with the light oxide and applied those patches as a decal.  The grey reporting mark patches were done the same way using primer gray.  The black numbers are MicroScale decals.

First Wordless Wednesday in a Long Time

Man, Is The Boss Gonna Be...

First up this week, Brian Smith sent me this recent detail photo from his layout. Brian captioned the photo with the following quip:

"Man, is the boss gonna be pissed".

George Dutka built the bike shop for Brian, and featured it over on his blog on March 10th http://whiteriverdivision.blogspot.com/2020/03/motorcycle-repair-shop.html and again at http://whiteriverdivision.blogspot.com/2020/03/brian-smith-layout-and-gtw-boxcar.html on March 17th.  George posted some really nice pictures of Brian's bike shop, so I urge you to check them out.


As part of a municipal upgrade project, The City of Sarnia has awarded a contract to build a sewer tunnel that will run some 40+ feet beneath the local CN rail yard.  In an article on that subject this week, the Sarnia Journal included this excellent Glenn Ogilvie aerial photo of the Sarnia rail yard(s).

The view is looking east.  "A" yard is at the top, "C" yard is at the bottom of the picture. The two yards and main line funnel under the Indian Road overpass. The Via station is the brown-roofed building on the left of the tracks. At the bottom of the picture is what's remaining of the Canadian National roundhouse, now leased by Lambton Diesel Specialties.


I was a little bit surprised to find this 86 foot GTW boxcar in the storage cabinet recently, as I'd forgotten that I even had it in there.  The large GT logo that was on the right-hand end seemed a bit thick, so I thought I'd remove it and replace it with a decal.  Removal was pretty easy, as it was a dry-transfer.  I simply put some masking tape over top of it, and when I tore that off the logo lifted right off.  That's how I removed some of the reporting mark on the other end as well.

The boxcar was unweathered, which would help to explain why it had never made it onto the layout.  The doors were silver (aluminum maybe), but I decided I'd paint over them and follow that up with weathering. 

Once completed and dry the boxcar arrived on the layout, fitting right in with some DT&I auto parts cars.

I painted the doors ModelFlex GT blue that I have on hand, and then faded the whole car by spraying it with Concrete Gray. I painted in the flat black patch for the new numbers decals, added another random black patch or two, and the old ACI bar-codes, as well as the lube plate stencil decals.